Ping Express, a Texas-based money transfer company, has pleaded guilty in the United States to money laundering fraud, after sending more than $ 160 million to Nigeria in suspicious transactions over a three-year period, some of the proceeds of which were revealed to be from online romance. fraud.
According to a statement issued by the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, Chad E. Meachan, he revealed that the firm admitted that it failed to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program and that they operated without a license in at least 5 U.S. states. states.
Ping Express CEO Anslem Oshianebe and COO Opeyemi Odeyale pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective money laundering program. They were both sentenced to 27 months in prison under U.S. legal documents.
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Ping Express IT / Business Development Manager Aleoghena Okhumale, who pleaded guilty to knowingly transferring illegal funds, was sentenced to 42 months in prison.
The U.S. Department of Justice revealed that Ping Express’ anti-money laundering policy claimed that it limited first-time customer transactions to $ 3,000 and monthly transactions to $ 4,500.
The company also admitted in court that it allowed more than 1,500 customers to break these rules. Ping Express also admitted that they were unable to seek sufficient details about the sources or the purpose of the funds it helped to transfer, or the customers who started the transfers.
By law, Ping Express was supposed to report all suspicious transactions to regulators, but according to US court documents, the fintech company broke the law by failing to make a single report on money laundering during 3 years of operation.
The company revealed that it has software that can detect and deter transfers initiated in “unlicensed” states, but it revealed that the software did not work. This money laundering and money laundering fraud in states where it was not licensed in the United States by Ping Express has meant doom not only for company executives who risk imprisonment, but also for the company as a whole.
The company risks a five-year trial and a fine of up to $ 500,000. The sentencing for these offenders is set for 19 December 2022.
Ping Express’s experience should be a wake-up call for other fintech companies to take their anti-money laundering legislation seriously, nor should they hesitate to report suspicious transactions on their platform to relevant authorities.
Fintechs today are constantly exposed to the risk of money laundering and much more. In an effort to mitigate such a risk, machine learning is a Fintech solution that has great potential to combat money laundering.
This program uses algorithms to analyze information, make decisions and learn from those decisions. Machine Learning can change its code without human supervision, so it can make faster and more accurate decisions.
This machine learning technology has been shown to undergo money laundering and identify obscure predictive variables that are often not noticed by computer scientists.
You may be interested to know that some fintech start-ups continue to underestimate the scope of compliance, which is very risky. Fintech companies must ensure that they are constantly obliged to prevent their company from persons who seek to launder proceeds from criminal activity or risk imprisonment and fines.
